Some Thoughts on School

I really dislike how purposelessly people approach school. So, I'll itemize my views on the purpose of school.

For about up to 5th grade, I simply did well in school because that is the habit my parents had instilled in me early on. They also told me the justification for their desire for me to do well in school: get a high-paying job. As I didn't really think all that much back then, I simply accepted this. This actually corresponds pretty well with the conformity to adults' expectations stage of Kohlberg's moral development (preconventional). Back then, I embodied what I hate about many high schooler's view of school/education.

From 6th to about the first semester of 11th grade, I based my motivation for school on reducing privilege. I found myself extremely guilty at the thought of wasting my education. At this stage I came to realize the privilege I had. I found it abhorrent to waste a significantly better education than most all whilst languishing under familial, fiscal, and medical stability and security. I was exposed to the stereotype of education, the massive amount of work, bullying, bad teachers, and found it fortunate that I didn't suffer under much of that. Furthermore, I came to recognize the lack of any education system for billions of people and began to push to maximize the extreme privilege that I was born into. Hence my middle school schedule being the product of me trying to optimize for my future. This philosophy really began to manifest itself when I entered high school. In high school, there were significantly more opportunities, and I felt a need to take advantage of them. Thus I tried to optimize my course-load, join clubs, ran for leadership positions, etc. Here we see a very good motivation for doing well in school: a desire to maximize one's privilege. I still think this philosophy can work pretty well, but there are some flaws. For one, it assumes that school is the biggest source of privilege. If we instead assume that a comfy existence is the biggest source of privilege, then school isn't necessarily the focus. Instead I think a more creative, divergent-thinking approach would be needed for life. For two, this path isn't strictly optimized to eliminate/maximize privilege. My parents' persistent career perspective on education really threw me off. From about 6th to late 9th grade I defined the optimization value to be career oriented ... I took Spanish to add it to my résumé, I joined DECA to gain career-oriented skills, when considering future jobs I also consider salary and employment, I focused on personal finance to grow my own wealth. I am now disgusted by my shallowness, and that is a failing of this motivational system. The single-minded approach it takes leaves open the possibility of concentrating efforts on garbage. For three, this theory doesn't consider the theory of anthropic development that civilizations progress from improved data processing ability. Thus a desire to "do it all" would really be making no progress and has no data/value management structure. It sounded wildly optimistic, but back then I believed that mankind had infinite ability through our unique trait of binary free-will.

Nowadays, I still am cognizant of my privilege, but I have expanded it beyond school as the focus of my privilege. I am now oriented towards maximizing post-death intellectual progress and balancing that with a desire to fix current issues. I current plan is to enter a career as a research mathematician (to contribute to humanity's intellectual progress), but then donate as much time and money as I can to fixing the world's problems.

I think there is also a misunderstanding of the role of school. I think far too many people have the misconception that school will make you "smart". "Smart" is already an extremely viscous of a word, but I think by that they mean that schools produce Einsteins. As it's a very loaded work, I'll just consider intelligence instead. In psychology, there are two kinds of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. The former is significantly more crystallized from birth (ironically) with the latter being less so. This distinction is important as crystallized intelligence is what schools improve. This is the primary function of the school system: load our brains with knowledge. A common critique of schooling is that the information can be found on the internet. That is true, but that doesn't make the internet better than schools. On the internet, it is hard to verify authenticity. By this I mean that the bureaucratic nature of schools makes information much more verified and slow to change, and thus more robust against attempts to add potential misinformation too early. Also, the internet doesn't provide any proof of knowledge. In schools, by working through worksheets and assignments about the content, you engage and learn the content. For sure, the internet is much better for recollecting random facts. However, humans aren't just recalling machines, something unique about us is our ability to synthesize, process, and collect information. Thus if we simply just have the internet have our knowledge, then no new knowledge can be made. Hence the structure of a class helps load our brains with concepts and "facts" (quotes because knowledge is rather fickle in the view of epistemology; the quotes aren't sarcastic). Evidence of this can be seen through how rushed math classes are. They are rushed because there is a lot of content that they want to cram into us. Thus I believe that Einsteins are born, but schools give them the ability to do Einstein things.

On somewhat of a tangent, this is what I believe makes Collegeboard more unique as an educational organization. They take much more of a focus on fluid intelligence when designing classes. Just consider the nature of timing. By timing us, they aren't trying to necessarily test our knowledge (otherwise they could give us a lot of time). They are instead trying to test our familiarity with the content and how we can process it. This idea came from Heimler's history, and I think social studies AP classes are good examples of this. On the AP test mcq, they will really never ask recall questions like the date of some event or the definition of some term. Instead, they ask people to think around the concept to relate it to other things. This is what makes them tricky: they require a working knowledge of the history, but also historical thinking. This philosophy also permeates other subjects like statistics, chemistry, and physics where on frqs they ask us novel questions about novel concepts, but we are able to do them by demonstrating a true mastery and familiarity with the topic at hand. This imo is very brilliant and makes AP classes more fun than regular classes. It is exciting to see and try to come up with something novel that no high schooler really has ever seen or studied for before just by using your knowledge. Although, this makes Collegeboard a diluting factor in school's primary function.

Furthermore, imagine social life without schools. By providing a place for commonalities and interactions, they give people a chance to interact and form friends, share ideas, etc. Some may respond along the lines of "I would still go out and meet people". To that I say, "do what?". How would you know what interests you have without previous interactions with people, subjects, ideas, clubs, etc? In this regard, schools provide a secondary function. I somewhat wish they relied on this function a little more. I find the idea of intellectual saloons very fascinating, and I wish schools replicated this in some way. Also imagine the difficulty for parents to watch their kids thus providing a tertiary function.